Gmail suffers major outage, no explanation yet

PanARMENIAN.Net - Gmail service went down worldwide Friday afternoon, frustrating millions of users. The outage also affected other Google services such as Hangouts and Google+, Mashable says.

Google's apps dashboard initially showed all Google services in the green, but it was updated at around 2:20 pm ET to show a service disruption for Gmail. Gmail stopped working for both web and mobile apps as well as third-party clients such as Apple Mail, suggesting that the entire back-end (IMAP) service was affected.

Users attempting to sign on saw a "temporary error" message and a brief note: "We're sorry, but your Gmail account is temporarily unavailable. We apologize for the inconvenience and suggest trying again in a few minutes."

Judging from the response on Twitter, the outage appeared to be worldwide and affected other Google services as well. Hangouts and Google+ both stopped working; some Google Drive users were reporting connection issues, too. The Google homepage remained unaffected, though, as were Google's main search products. Google Calendar appeared unaffected as well.

The full effects of the outage won't be known until Google addresses how extensive it was, but since it affected Google users worldwide, the cost to business productivity is potentially vast, Mashable says.

According to a recent InformationWeek survey, 29% of large companies supported Gmail or had plans to, but 63% of small businesses do. A Gartner study from last spring showed Google making significant inroads against Microsoft Office for businesses productivity suites.